Costa Rica Part 6 – Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve

On day 7 of our trip it was time to head inland and upland, i.e, up to the town of Monteverde, located in the mountains at 1440m. The draw here is the Cloud Forest (bosque nuboso), a rare forest type located in tropical or subtropical mountain environments where there is a consistent cloud cover. There are over 100 species of mammals, 400 species of birds, and 1200 species of amphibians and reptiles living within the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve.

There are a number of different parks and reserves in this area, each offering different activities. We spent a day at Selvatura Park, which included a canopy walk, butterfly garden, herptarium and frogs, hummingbird garden, and insect museum. There was also ziplining, but we were there for the wildlife and landscape.

Everything was with a guide, except for the hummingbird garden. We were impressed at how knowledgeable all the guides were! Our first tour was the main event, the canopy tour with the hanging bridges. We saw lots of interesting and beautiful plants and birds…and I can’t remember the names of any of them. But here they are!

The beginnings of a fern

Looking at baby birds in a nest

Even the trees are expressive in the cloud forest.

Next, we toured the butterfly garden, herptarium and frogs, and the insect museum (i.e., insect collections…not live insects). The butterfly garden was quite large, with a wide variety of butterflies and flowers.

The frogs and reptiles were really neat, but don’t photograph well in their glass aquariums. Here is one lizard to serve as a representative of the herptarium.

No pictures of the pinned insects…although that was actually surprisingly interesting!

Our last stop at Selvatura was the hummingbird garden. It was a cozy little garden with a few hummingbird feeders and benches to sit and relax. If you stand still the hummingbirds will use your finger as a perch to drink! Both Mom and Dad served as excellent hummingbird perches. I did not…see, not only were there hummingbirds around the feeders, there were also wasps. I have never liked wasps, and after last summer’s traumatizing wasp experience I really don’t do wasps. So I failed miserably at holding my finger still long enough for a hummingbird to land. I did take some pics though!

There was also a coati that wandered through! This was exciting…until later we saw one in the garbage can (like, literally climbing in and fully disappeared), and realized that they’re basically the Costa Rican equivalent of Canadian trash pandas (i.e., racoons).

But they’re still cute.

The other thing we did in Monteverde was a night walk – this was SO cool! We paid for a private tour with a very small company called Johnny Loves Nature Eco-Tours – it is Johnny himself who owns the company and does most of the tours, but hires his brother for a few. He picked us up at our hotel and drove us to a small, nearby reserve. The tour was worth it before we even got there though – en route we stopped to admire some snoozing sloths that he has spotted on the way over!

The tour was awesome. I was expecting mostly creepy crawlies, and we did see one tarantula, but we also had some really good mammal sightings – we had a perfect sighting of an armadillo, a weasel, an olingo, and a weasel! Plus frogs, tree frogs, toads, lizards, and a teeny tiny praying mantis. Johnny was a fantastic guide – he was extremely knowledgeable, and extremely enthusiastic – some of the mammals we saw aren’t that common, and he was really excited to see them and show them to us!

Given the fact that this was after dark, there was no point in trying to take pictures. One of those experiences to just be enjoyed in the moment. But if you’re even visiting the cloud forest, a night walk should be on your to-do list. I highly recommend Johnny’s tour, but even if you go with someone else, make sure you’re with a small group. The animals move quickly, and had we been a larger group only the first 2-3 people would have seen many of them.

Be forewarned, the drive up is not for the faint of heart. I only screamed outwardly once (we were on the outside of a switchback with a precipitous drop when a bus came hurtling around the corner, half in our lane), but I rarely stopped screaming inside. Near the top we weren’t near as many cliffs but the road had some really rough sections. It’s totally doable, tourists do it all the time, but it’s definitely not super fun. If you’re leery, there are lots of tourist buses to shuttle people to Monteverde and back.